Brothers Judd Blog

If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)

September 2025

Brothers Judd

PREACH, BROTHER:

We Take Clouds for Granted (Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Sept. 10, 2025, NY Times)


I love the way clouds billow above your head, drift lazily across blue skies and cast fleeting shadows on the ground below. These ever-shifting sculptures of vapor and light are among nature’s least appreciated marvels.

That’s why 20 years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society, to remind people to look up. Now climate science is catching up, revealing that clouds aren’t just poetic; they’re pivotal in helping to regulate Earth’s temperature. And their influence on the climate is evolving in ways we’re only beginning to understand.

Identitarianism

THE CAUSE WAS IDENTITARIANISM, NOT SPEECH:

Charlie Kirk Didn’t Shy Away From Who He Was. We Shouldn’t Either. (Jamelle Bouie, 9/13/25, NY Times)


To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.


“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”

Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.

It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.

And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.

On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.

“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year.

Long War

HITLER WAS NO FASCIST:

Ur-Fascism (Umberto Eco, June 22, 1995, The New York Review of Books)

During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called “premature anti-fascists” — meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists… . Why was an expression like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?

Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan, while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian regimes.

Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family, while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.

Music

MAYBE YOU CAN MEET YOUR HEROES:

Living in the Present with John Prine (Tom Piazza, 10/08/18, Oxford American)

The last time I wrote a profile of a musician—that Jimmy Martin piece, twenty-two years ago—I ended up backstage at the Grand Ole Opry. Crowded hallways with people hollering and pushing their way through, musicians in jeweled suits warming up with fiddles and guitars, people telling jokes and other people squeezing past on their way to the stage. Jimmy had gotten drunk at his house, and I had to drive us to Opryland in his midnight-blue Lincoln stretch limo, which kept stalling out; when we got there he tried to pick a fight with Ricky Skaggs and almost managed to punch out Bill Anderson. So far the worst thing that’s happened on this trip is that Prine hogged all the tiramisu last night. And now we are going to a shoe store. A shoe store, I think—this is what twenty-two years can do for you.

We walk into the store, and John heads for a display where leather Top-Siders are lined up. I look around the shop. I’ve been having trouble with my own feet, actually. The salesperson greets me respectfully and calls me “sir.” As long as John’s trying out shoes I figure there’s nothing to lose by looking at some myself. There’s a slightly weird-looking pair, a dove-gray hybrid of sneaker, boat shoe, and walking shoe. I ask the clerk for a pair in 10 1/2; he brings them and they feel pretty good, incredibly lightweight, although there is a lot of room up by my toes, and the tops of the shoes have a kind of weird pucker; they look like space shoes. I ask the clerk if I can see a pair of tens.

While I’ve been doing this, John has settled on a pair of boat shoes featuring extremely shiny brass eyelets. They are some seriously bright eyelets.

“Jeez,” I say. “You’ll have to wear sunglasses to cut down on the glare.”

“They feel great,” he says, walking back and forth.

“It’s nice they throw in the shoes when you buy the eyelets.”

“I can black them out with a magic marker.”

We both buy the shoes we’ve been looking at. We walk outside into the heat and stand in front of the store, holding our shopping bags. I’m trying not to imagine what we must look like. We put on our sunglasses. “There’s your article, right there,” he says. “Buying shoes with John Prine!”

All Comedy is Conservative

COMEDY PRICKS OUR GANFALON BUBBLES:

The power of fun (Daniel Inman, 15 September, 2025, The Critic)

What made Bakhtin so radical was his insistence that the comic and the grotesque reveal truths that are inaccessible to the institutions of solemn authority. In carnival laughter, the mask and the parody, he saw not an escape from reality but a deeper engagement with it. The “grotesque body”, as he described it — eating, drinking, laughing, exceeding its boundaries — stands in contrast to the polished, self-contained body of rulers and institutions. Through carnival, societies give voice to the unsayable, expose the temporary nature of all power, and remind themselves that no order is permanent — through laughter “the world is seen anew, no less (and perhaps more) profoundly than when seen from the serious standpoint” (Rabelais and His World, Trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1984)), 66). The grotesque, in this sense, is not distasteful but positively subversive and regenerative. […]

Perhaps one of Bakhtin’s most unsettling insights, however, is that carnival never stays carnival for long. The laughter, parody, and inversion that once mocked authority always carry within them the seeds of their own ossification. Once victorious, the jesters so often become the judges: movements born in joyous defiance harden into new orthodoxies, policing their own rituals of seriousness with the very severity they once ridiculed and leaving those in authority struggling to understand the new terrain.

Identitarianism

WRONG FROM THE BEGINNING:

No, Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way (David Corn, 9/11/25, MoJo)


Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded and led Turning Point USA, an organization of young conservatives, was a promoter of Trump’s destructive and baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Two days before the January 6 riot, Kirk boasted in a tweet that Students for Trump and Turning Point Action were “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.” […]

He hosted white nationalists on his podcast. He posted racist comments on his X account, including this remark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” He endorsed the white “replacement” conspiracy theory. After the October 7 attack on Israel, he compared Black Lives Matter to Hamas. He called for preserving “white demographics in America.” He asserted that Islam was not compatible with Western culture. He derided women who supported Kamala Harris 2024 for wanting “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” Or, as he also put it, “Democratic women want to die alone without children.” When Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was brutally attacked in 2022, Kirk spread a conspiracy theory about the crime and called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the assailant. He routinely deployed extreme rhetoric to demonize his political foes. […]

Moreover, as a movement strategist, he relied upon and advanced lies and bigotry—including falsehoods that fueled violence and an assault on our national foundation. That was not a side gig for Kirk. It was a core component of his organizing. He did not practice politics the right way. He used deceit to develop his movement and to weaken the United States. His assassination is heinous and frightening and warrants widespread condemnation. It should prompt reflection on what is happening within the nation and what needs to be done to prevent further political violence. It should not protect him or others who engage in such politics of extremism from critical review.

Identitarianism

IT’S THE UNIVERSALISM THE rIGHT HATES:

“Love Your Neighbor as Yourself” Means Everyone—Including Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees: John Fugelsang Debunks Christian Nationalism (John Fugelsang, September 12, 2025, LitHub)

–And of course, the small matter of Jesus clearly stating that he’ll judge us on that welcome-the-stranger business in Matthew 25:40, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

So what’s an immigrant-hating Christian to do?

There aren’t really any Bible verses devoted to “repelling the stranger.” But Christians who hate the undocumented have found a way around this: by ignoring all of the Old Testament, all of Jesus, and talking about law and order.

Identitarianism is anti-Christian.

Presidents

THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH’S FUNCTION:

A Quiet Administrative Revolution: Changes in bureaucratic procedure are revolutionizing how the administrative state works—potentially reestablishing democratic control.(Donald Devine, 9/08/25, Law & Liberty)

The ruling provision of the OPM guidance directly states that “covered agencies and subdivisions are no longer subject to [certain] collective-bargaining requirements.” As a result, executive agencies no longer must engage in collective bargaining with federal unions. Consequently, the original recognition of the relevant unions no longer applies, and unions lose their status as exclusively recognized labor organizations requiring agency facilitation in collecting union dues.

Agencies are further arguably allowed to proceed with personnel policies generally, including reductions in force. Units covered by the memorandum include the departments of Defense, State, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Justice, and Homeland Security, and substantial parts of most other major federal agencies. All are directed “to return to the policies of Executive Order 13839” and are “accordingly required to, consistent with applicable law, return performance evaluations to 30 days, and administer discipline and unacceptable performance policies to those set in the first Trump administration and to separate employees for unacceptable performance in appropriate cases.” Union involvement in employee separations was invalidated, and government-paid union positions were eliminated.

A memorandum titled “Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives” revived performance management principles requiring actual plans from each top career senior executive to be evaluated by a political superior and reviewed by performance review boards managed by non-career executives. Failure to perform could lead to removal without an appeal to an administrative review. Similar procedures would again cover second-level career supervisors as in the original Carter legislation.

Together, these reforms change the nature of government administration. The union-related changes alone are fundamental. These weaken government unions and associations’ powers, agency fees, and costs, freeing willing career managers and executives to implement the decisions of presidentially appointed agency leaders. Even Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt opposed unionizing federal government employees.

Identitarianism

DUDES, YOU’RE ORCS:

Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits: Tech power players and the global far-right are learning all the wrong lessons from “The Lord of the Rings.” ( Michiko Kakutani, May 23, 2025, NY Times)


Literary classics, of course, can support myriad interpretations, and we live in an age when the points of view of readers are increasingly prioritized over authorial intentions. At the same time, it’s astonishing how many contemporary takes on classic works of fantasy and science fiction fly in the face of both common sense and authors’ known views of the world.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as “Meta” — a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” which depicts an alarming dystopian future where corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose.

Or take Stargate, the name of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced in conjunction with the Trump administration. Its name, weirdly, is the title of a campy 1994 sci-fi movie in which a stargate device opens a portal to a faraway planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the sort of magical portal most people would want to open.

Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.

Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”

Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” while the artificial intelligence military start-up Anduril refers to Aragorn’s reforged sword.

The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? This question drives stories set in outer space (from “Star Trek” to “Star Wars” to “Doctor Who”) and stories set in a mythical past. In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.

Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).

In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Thiel traced his fascination with immortality to the elves in “Lord of the Rings,” calling them “humans who don’t die.” Echoing the interviewer he asked: “Why can’t we be elves?”

The neoreactionary ideologue Curtis Yarvin, who thinks American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy or “chief executive,” dismissively refers to the sort of ordinary voters who helped elect Trump as hobbits who only “want to grill and raise kids.”

Tolkien, in contrast, proudly described himself as “a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.” Not only is “Lord of the Rings” told from the point of view of the hobbits, but it’s Frodo’s gardener, the humble Sam Gamgee — not the noble king Aragorn or the great wizard Gandalf — who emerges as the real hero of the epic.

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